The difference between a medical instrument and a torture device is the person holding it, as the patients of Christopher Duntsch are all too acutely aware. Over two years, the ostensibly well-credentialed neurosurgeon inflicted life-altering injuries on more than 30 patients while working at several hospitals across Texas. In 2017 he was convicted of maiming an elderly woman and was given a life sentence.
Based on a podcast of the same name, Dr Death — a Peacock drama newly acquired by Channel 4 — traces Duntsch’s terrible career, and follows the efforts of colleagues who fought to put an end to it. Despite the off-puttingly flippant title, the eight-part series is an impactful, agitating true-crime chiller that carefully balances the gravity of the scandal with elements of grotesque horror. Rather than numbing us with sensation, it cuts through to very real anxieties about putting one’s life in the hands of a relative stranger.
In Duntsch’s case those hands were at best dangerously unskilled, at worst monstrously sadistic. We hear nauseating descriptions of the internal wreckage he left behind: vertebrae that look “like putty”, spinal leakages, sliced vocal cords. At other times the show is more lurid, confronting us with the awful sound of metal on bone.
Most repulsive, however, is Duntsch himself, played with unnerving intensity by Joshua Jackson. It is easy to see how patients fell for his charming, confident charlatanry, and hard to understand how a man so volatile and so intoxicated with self-importance (and drugs) could get so far.
That he thought he could play god is well-established, but whether he was consciously seeking to put patients through hell is less clear. And though the first episodes delve into his insecurities, delusions and contempt for others, the show largely avoids explicit psychological profiling.
“The question isn’t why he did it, it’s how he got away with it,” says Dr Robert Henderson (Alec Baldwin, measured), who, along with Dr Randall Kirby (Christian Slater, animated), exposed not only Duntsch but the organisational failings that enabled him. The surgeon terrifies, but the system enrages.
★★★★☆
On Channel 4 in the UK from 10pm on June 20 and on Peacock in the US
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